Metal Gear Rising on PC cannot be played offline, but don’t worry, it’s just a bug

This week Konami finally launched Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance on PC via Valve’s digital games service Steam. We already knew that the game requires a relatively decent PC in order to be played, with a Core i5-2400, 2GB RAM, and GeForce GTS 450 being the minimum. However, there’s another requirement no one expected: an Internet connection.

It seems the version of the game Konami uploaded to Steam cannot be played in offline mode. It gets worse than that, though. Right now this classes as an always-connected game, meaning if your Internet connection fails you’ll be thrown out of the single-player action.

I thought always-connected DRM was a trend that had died out, or was near death due to how unpopular it is with gamers. Thankfully, Konami has confirmed via Twitter that the online requirement isn’t a feature they have included on purpose. It is simply a bug.

I’m not sure how such a bug could be overlooked, or what in fact would cause a game to bug out without a connection by accident. It has been suggested the bug isn’t within the game itself, but instead related to the Steam API being used. So Konami’s solution may require help from Valve.

Konami is working on a fix and an update should be released soon. If you’ve got a rock solid Internet connection then just keep playing. When the patch appears it is unlikely it will have any major impact on the game, like rendering save games useless. It will simply remove the need to be online all the time.